Blog

I’m happy to announce that Umbra has moved to a sweet new office! We’ve been busy with boxes and moving labels, and on the moving day elevators were out of order. But the end result is spacious, shiny and worth the trouble. And maybe some champagne and a few beers. Anyways.. We use the word … Continued

A while back, Sampo wrote about the challenges in developing virtual reality games. It’s no secret that almost all of us are passionate gamers. Obviously we are eager to see what the future will hold for VR gaming – other than horror experiences that is – as it’s a huge step in graphics performance as well. … Continued

Nothing is more visible than things hidden -Confucius Sometimes it’s good to stop for a while, smell the procedural vegetation and think about where you’ve come. Let’s do that now – I’ll review the core problem Umbra’s known for solving and what’s required from a good solution. A pentimento in The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan … Continued

Excuse me kids, grandpa needs to sit down for this one… I can still remember that cold Saturday back in December 1993 when my friend came over with a stack of floppy disks that he’d been downloading overnight with his top-of-the line 14400bps (hey, that’s a whopping 1.8 kilobytes per second!) Supra modem from a local … Continued

I consider gamers quite lucky. We have tons of devices to play with, something for every taste and need. I jumped out of my #PcMasterRace life after getting bored with the constant component upgrading I felt I had to do in order to keep up, and have been a console girl ever since. I don’t … Continued

Consumer Virtual Reality is finally here! Oculus and HTC Vive cater for the ones who want the best visuals and have the deepest pockets, whereas Gear VR, Google Cardboard are for consumers who prefer a lower price point and appreciate mobility over visual fidelity. Every platform has plenty of content to consume from 360 videos … Continued

Hey guys, I am so happy to let you all know that our talk with Eidos-Montréal can be finally found at GDC Vault! I know you want to see the good stuff from Nicolas Trudell (starting around after 10 minutes), but there is also some information about Umbra in general included and our CEO Otso … Continued

Umbra 3.4 is a major update and introduces a number of significant improvements. The computation of Tome data has been completely rewritten, yielding a more robust and scalable implementation. This not only results in a solid foundation upon which new improvements can be built, but also in a number of immediately useful enhancements. This paper … Continued

To get more understanding about the concept of point clouds, we did a simple prototype for visualizing massive point clouds here at Umbra. Point cloud simply means a set of 3D points, which are typically gathered by scanning real world with an airplane or rotating scanning station. Point clouds are largely used in non-gaming industry … Continued

Today is a great day for us as we proudly announce our next project which will be something else entirely. As you may know already, we are big on improving 3D graphics performance especially in games and VR, but we haven’t actually made any content ourselves. This is something we have always felt sorry for … Continued